Risking it all

“Too many people are thinking of security instead of opportunity. They seem to be more afraid of life than death.” – James F. Bymes

I don’t have any idea who this author is or what he was famous for other than good quotes. But I quite like this one. It seems to put an ordinary statement in a new light. Most people, at least most people I know are all against taking risks of any kind. I am not a major risk-taker myself normally but I have tried it a couple of times with decent success. Most of the time though I am rather afraid of doing anything perhaps because internally I am more afraid of success and having to work for it but cloaking it under the guise of a myriad excuses.

Currently I don’t have a job (at least not one that pays!!) and neither does my husband. We are starting a company – actually he is – I am along for the ride. We have plenty of loans to pay back to various banks and we also have two children to educate and any number of expenses (unavoidable and avoidable both). So it did sound crazy to the people we knew – of course they were all encouraging but I could see the non-belief in their eyes – there were similar risk-takers in our circle of acquaintances but none who sacrificed total earning power to follow a dream. Of course my dream is different and I have yet to find a way of following it but I am trying a little everyday.

Following your dreams at the expense of security is not for everyone – not many can afford it but if you can, it is good to try at least once in this lifetime or as the saying that inspired this article implies, you will never be truly alive. Security is an illusion – that we have any control over it is an illusion – that we can plan for any eventuality is an illusion too – sometimes things happen and we have to deal with it as best we can. But it is not the goal of human life to live in fear – ours is a noble nature meant to fly and we are perhaps the only one of God’s creatures who can truly do that.

Seeping memories...

I’ve always taken my good memory for granted. I was an exceptional student who didn’t have to spend time trying to comprehend or memorize anything. All through my childhood, I devised games with rhymes and words which I think helped my retention power immensely. I remember getting this book of dinosaurs one day and my excitement at the lovely pictures in it – I must have been nine or so. The names were long and involved – not your average tyrannosaurus, brontosaurus or stegosaurus – so in order to remember them I made up a song with all the names – I did that to tackle almost anything I wanted to memorize and I loved collecting words as if they were precious stones.

It may be because of this then that I was disturbed after watching a portion of a movie yesterday. The movie was about a well read and intelligent man’s road to self-destruction because of Alzheimer’s syndrome. I won’t go into the details of the movie because I saw only twenty minutes of it but that was painful enough. I have read about this issue in books of fiction as well as in newspaper and online articles but actually seeing a portrayal was shocking. The family’s suffering was horrific. The patient himself was completely unaware (or at least only intermittently aware) of what was happening to him and he remembered only his childhood days and very little of anything else. So he was in fact mostly happy. The family on the other hand was coping with a nightmarish situation in which the primary breadwinner and the pivot of their life was unable to contribute in any way. The children lost their father and the wife lost her husband. Even death seemed preferable to seeing the merciless disintegration of a human being memory by memory.

I shudder to think of what it would be like to have a brain that is leaking memories– where nagging thoughts are vaguely eating at you but you cannot catch them – or worse, where there are a few lucid moments when you know exactly what is happening and yet are powerless to stop it.